Regards
Judith Geichman: Diamond
September 12—October 24, 2018
Chicago-based artist Judith Geichman sees images and potential artworks in the stained concrete, spills and crumbling walls of the city. It’s because of this quality, of not being separate from the world nor simply illustrating it, that Geichman’s neutral-hued paintings feel so much of our world. Modernist in many ways, the paintings in this exhibition harness the power of gestural marks to embody and instill emotion. In previous bodies of work, Geichman based her compositions on patterns, both as grounds and in a kind of signature scraped, triple-pronged mark. Patterning recurs in Diamond, though it seems under duress by comparison. In one of the artist’s untitled works, masses of spray painted marks and smudged brushstrokes encroach upon a harlequin motif, while in another the pattern is literally cracking into pieces on the surface. In Geichman’s two largest canvases the diamond pattern is rendered as the most tenuous of structures, barely recognizable in a loose, spray-painted hand.
One of the most telling pieces, however, was an installation of seven diamond-shaped paintings peppered with splatters and strokes on bare canvas, six of them nestled together while the seventh hung off to the left, as if it strayed from the flock. This lone canvas is not just falling to the wayside, it is in itself coming undone, with a folded edge flapping loosely, unstapled from its stretcher. Throughout Diamond, structure is undermined, sometimes through the apparent dismantling of some rigid formulation, sometimes through the sensation that a foundation is disintegrating. At a time of social upheaval, viewing these paintings conjures familiar feelings of unease and chaos, as well as that of freedom and potential. Or maybe we just respond to the Rorschach-like nature of Geichman’s abstractions, projecting the content we see in them from within us.
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